WILKERSON - Nietzsche and the Greeks

8/12/2019 WILKERSON - Nietzsche and the Greeks

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Nietzsche and the reeks


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Continuum Studies in Philosophy:

Tolerance and the Ethical Life, Andrew FialaAquinas and the Ship of Theseus, hristopher M BrownDescartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature, Justin SkirryKierkegaa rd s A nalysis o f Radical Evil, David A RobertsRousseau s Theory of Freedom, Matthew SimpsonLeibniz Reinterpreted: The Harmony of Things, Lloyd StricklandPopper s Theory of Science, arlos Garcia


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Nietzsche and the Greeks

ale W ilkerson

ont nuumL O N O N N E W Y O R


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Continuum International Publishing Group

The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane11 York Road Suite 7 4London New YorkSE1 7NX NY 10038

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Dale Wilkerson 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form orby any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any informationstorage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Dale Wilkerson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to beidentified as Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record fo r this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 0-8264-8903-6 (hardback)

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Contents

Abbreviations vii

1 Classical Studies for the Benefit of a Time to Come 12 Who are Nietzsche s Greeks? 23 Scepticism, Pessimism and the Exemplar of Greek Culture 514 Formal Variation in Pre-Platonic Cosmologies and Nietzsche s

Doctrine of Will to Power 895 Nietzsche s Leap on the Boundary Stone, Heraclitus 1 34

Index 1 55

V


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Abbreviations

A Anti-Christ in Twilight of the IdolslThe Anti-Christ trans. R. J.Hollingdale New York: Penguin, 1968)

BGE Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann New York:Vintage Books, 1989) the number given is the aphorism number)

Breazeale Daniel Breazeale ed. and trans.) Philosophy and T ruth: Selectionsfrom Nietzsche s Notebooks of the Early 1870s New Jersey:Humanities Press, 1979)

BT The Birth of Tragedy

D Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1996) the number given is the aphorism number)

EH Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale New York: Penguin, 1992)

GM On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans.Carol Diethe Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

GS The G ay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann New York: Vintage,1974 the number given is the aphorism number)

H Human All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber Lincoln, NA:Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 1996) the numbergiven is the aphorism number)

HOC Homer on Competition , in On the Genealogy of Morals, ed.Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1995)


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viii ABBREVIATIONS

KGWand Mario Carpitella Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter,1995)

KSA Samtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe ed . Giorgio Colli andMazzino Montinari, 15 vols Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980)

KSAB Samtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe ed . Giorgio Colli andMazzino Montinari Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986)

MA Nietzsches Gesammelte Werke, eds Max and Richard Oehler, 23vols Munich: Musarion, 1920-29)

NS Nietzsche Studien

OTL On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense , in Daniel Breazeale ed. and trans.) Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche sNotebooks of the Early 1870s New Jersey: Humanities Press,1979)

PPP Greg Whitlock ed. and trans.) The Pre-Platonic Philosophers Urbana and Chicago, IL: University o f Illinois Press, 2001)

PTG Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greek, trans. Marianne

Cowan Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 1962)TI Twilight of the Idols trans. R. J. Hollingdale New York: Penguin

Books, 1968)

UM Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995)

W TP Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale New York: Vintage, 1968)

Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale New York:Penguin, 1969)

Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Fritz Bornmann


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Classical Studies for the Benef i t o f a

Time to C o m e

1 Ad-vantage ro m the untimely perspective

In the early to mid-1870s at the University of Basel, the young FriedrichNietzsche prepared a series of lectures on the ancient world s philosophy ,literature and rhetoric. In addition to producing these works at Basel, hewrote numerous short essays, some of which, at least, are relatively wellknown by now. Nietzsche also saw three book-length projects publishedduring this decade, includ ing his first full manuscript, The Birth of TragedyNone of the lectures is as well known in the English-speaking world as thebooks and some of the short essays, and many of the lectures have not even

been translated into English. Moreover, some of the materials recently madeavailable, through re-editions in German and translations into other lan-guages, have yet to receive a full hearing from Nietzsche scholars. Hence,there is still m uch to be learned about N ietzsche from this early period, aboutthe developm ent of his thought, and its place in the nineteenth century . Thereis even much to be learned abou t Nietzsche s thought in light of thesematerials: a more comprehensive grasp of this thought is possible throughthem, as is a richer consideration of its consequences on the West.

Achieving a fuller understanding of Nietzsche will involve us in the projectof looking at his w ork , historically, as historians of ideas. Perhaps, then, weshould first ask: why do we study a history of thought? Why do we tend thisplant in the garden of knowledge? W hat characteristics shall we discern of itsfruit? Why do some of us find it so stimulating? W hat could tempt us to workfor this produce as we do? Is it m ere idleness, or worse? What does this plantyield to us? What do we yield to it? To be sure, any historical study of the


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2 NIETZSCHE AND THE GREEKS

hum an being s intellectual practices will expose strange patterns in ournatures, including the tendency to spend considerable amounts of energyoverflowing in unnecessary and impractical ways. When studying this his-

tory, w e uncover lifetimes of energy spent casting webs of ideas across mil-lennia; building traps for prey not easily held; mending inherited nets w henthis prey is no longer held (w as it ever really held?); laughing w hen the w orknow appears laughable; damning it, when dangerous; yet threading thematerials of even laughable and dangerous works into new structures thatsomehow seem less ridiculous, less reproachable, more trustworthy. Whatpossibilities will surface, when necessities of this kind of inquiry are laidbare?

The following study will consider questions such as the ones I have raised

here. It will do so as it examines the lesser-known and under-appreciatedworks of N ietzsche s early career, looking for evidence in these works sug-gesting how this period held sway in N ietzsche s later thoughts. My firstchapter will place Nietzsche s early period in the perspective of his moregeneral thoughts on history, introducing some of the principal concerns,attitudes, questions, responses and sources that spurred Nietzsche s classi-cism, while attempting to make out the vantage point Nietzsche procuredfrom such an exploration, its value to him as a critic o f m odern ity. Becausemy work is in some respects a study of Nietzsche s historical inquiries intoGreek culture and thought, I will begin by reflecting upon Nietzsche s strat-egies for considering the past .

In February of 1874 Nietzsche published the second of his UntimelyMeditationsa theoretical essay entitled On the Uses and Abuses of Historyfor Life , which contained sharp cultural criticism and analysis of the scienceof historical inquiry, the shining jewel of nineteenth-century German schol-arship in the human sciences. Nietzsche begins this essay w ith a quote takenfrom Goethe: In any case, I hate everything that m erely instructs me w ithout

augmenting or directly inv igorating my activity .1

At once, Nietzsche intend sthis passage to serve as a challenge to German scholarship, as a declarationof his ow n academic independence, and as a slightly veiled attempt to justifythe arguments he put forth in the much-criticized Birth of Tragedy publishedtwo years earlier.2 Nietzsche alerts readers here that academic work must invigorate life, and with this he begins developing the essay s main theme:history s value from the perspective of life . The scholar ought not to bebound to a work, according to Nietzsche, that does not serve life inmeaningful w ays. In the historian s discipline, this means that the scholar s

cultural needs must alw ays be held in the foreground of his inquiries, that thepast must not be understood as an abstraction under the scholar s micro-scope, as an object ready fo r classification, nor as a once-forgotten artefactbrought to light by the objective inquiries of the specialist.

The task of the historian will not involve identifying and preserving thepast as it really w as. Rather, the h istorian s account of the past, in Nietz-sche s view , necessarily implicates his instincts for life. The healthier theseinstincts are, the better the historian s account will serve. Comparing the past


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CL SSIC L STUDIES FOR THE BENEFIT OF T I M E TO C O M E 3

to a Greek oracle, N ietzsche suggests that to understand the past requires theinterpretive skill of a T iresias, who best of all Greeks understood the oracle'simperative, 'know thyself. That is to say, the past neither conceals nor

reveals' the historian's true identity but, in the words of Heraclitus, conveysthe imperative's meaning to the inquirer as a sign'. In one respect, this meansthat all examinations of the past are explorations of oneself, of the culturaland instinctual inheritances that have made one w hat one is and that suggestwhat one could become. In another respect, however, this analysis challengesreaders of history - not only to search out their own places in narratives ofthe past, but also to reflect on those desires (including all of their own) thathave contributed to these narratives.

For these reasons, it is important to approach the past, Nietzsche argues,with the question 'what does [the oracle] indicate .. .?'

3 How does the oracle

indicate the past? What, perhaps, may also be revealed in this indication?W ho is this supplicant kneeling at the altar of the past? Perhaps the limitsand possibilities of one's ow n self become visible in the ordering and play of necessity', disclosed in the historian's discipline, where historical forces andcontemporary needs meet.

Nietzsche identifies various 'historical modes' - those attitudes, assump-tions, needs and expectations that the scholar brings to his work as pre-suppositions for historical inquiry; yet, Nietzsche maintains that anunhistoric l mode of consciousness will prove, at times, most beneficial forlife. Oedipus, in some respects, might have been better served had he beenable to forget the oracle's prophecies, had he not looked too deeply into hispast. However, human beings, in recognizing the general mode comprisingthe it was', are fated to live with the force of temporal necessity, a recog-nition that compels our thoughts with the insight that being is only anuninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming, andcontradicting itself.4 W ho could live w ith this kind of historical revelation?

What would it take to live well in such light?Nietzsche offers a powerful and complex analysis of the various tracks ofhistorical consciousness and the uses and abuses of each. At the same time,this analysis problematizes the nature of the individuated temporal form -the moment its relationships to preceding and succeeding forms, and itsassociation with that general form known as temporality . Nietzsche s studyof the modes of history also raises questions concerning the role of thetemporalizing agent - the human being - and precisely what we bring toconsciousness by forgetting our fates, what we bring by forgetting the for-

getting, and what we bring by forgetting to forget. Difficult questions such asthese have long perplexed, provoked and inspired commentators ofNietzsche and twen tieth-century Continental thou ght. Y et, Nietzsche'sremarks make clear this much: one's investigations do not simply discloseheretofore forgotten truths from the past, like an archaeologist siftingthrough the mounds of time: the m eaning of the past is not fixed like bonessomewhere beyond the earth's surface. 'When the past speaks it alwaysspeaks as an oracle,' he says again, as if to emphasize the point that only


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NIETZSCHE AND THE GREEKS

those historians who know the present and who wish to become architects ofthe future will understand how to interpret the past . Indeed, only he whoconstructs th e future has a right to judge the past . 5

A survey of Nietzsche s early thou ght, I will argue, shows that whatNietzsche is claiming to be true here of the temporal form reflects a moregeneral truth regarding all concepts: the temporal form indeed disclosessomething of the past, but such a form m erely seems fixed, discoverable andconsistent. Likewise, the act of identifying all things in their form s - throughtheir characteristics, qualities, practices, functions and natures - demands thesame kind of attunem ent with the oracle s comm and that Nietzsche requiresof the historian. In short, true historical and ontological inquiry requires mastery of the self- a kind of disposition towards the temporal and spatial

placements, order, rank and potential, of all beings, including the self.Throughout my study of Nietzsche s Greeks , we will see that Nietzscheworks to describe how the human being may develop this self-mastery . Insuch a description, Nietzsche identifies certain necessities that are thenstockpiled in his lexicon as concepts for later deployment; such conceptsinclude the cultivation of general and individual tastes, natural and specifi-cally human instincts and intuitions, the freedom of spirit, and the form-giving boundaries of cultural identity and cultural health. The disclosure ofexternal forms, in Nietzsche s view, is facilitated by one s culture, by a cul-tural perspective, although the disclosure itself is also a consequence of theindividual having turned energies inward. For these reasons, we shall not besurprised to find tha t N ietzsche s reading of the G reeks is forem ost an act ofcritiquing his own times.

Claims regarding instinct , intuition , mastery and health are notor-iously vague, to be sure, especially considering their significance to thegeneral schemata of N ietzsche s thoughts, and we must say, right off, thatNietzsche s propensity to rely so heavily upon such concepts indicates that he

maintains an intuitive posture towards them. Such a posture, how ever, doesnot dismiss their importance, at least from a Nietzschean perspective. We willalso find, on the contrary, that Nietzsche frequently employs a scientificmanner of reaching and sharing his conclusions, steeped heavily in the latestintellectual developments of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche is generallyrecognized to balk, however, at blindly intuitive claims and at those relyingexclusively on the empirical sciences; to be sure, then, we will need toexamine in grea ter detail Nietzsche s strategies for bringing forth suchimprecise concepts for deployment in philosophical thought.

Nietzsche s early analysis of the entanglements seeming to ensnare thehistorians narrative in one s perspective is reactivated later in his career,whenever he comments on the nature of history and historical inquiry. In1881 s The Gay Science for example, Nietzsche contends that

Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all ofhistory is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the pastcrawl out of their hiding places - into is sunshine. There is no way of


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CLASSICAL STUDIES FOR THE BENEFIT OF A TIME TO COME 5

telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past is stillessentially undiscovered So many retroactive forces are still needed.6

Rather than conceptualizing the past in the light of a fixed, eternal truth,historical inquiry brings forth criticism from an ever-changing perspective. Insome respects, Nietzsche s analysis of the historical criticism of ideas isechoed by Deleuze and Guattari w hen they claim that criticism is the act ofsetting up a plane in such a way that problems are disclosed that cannot beresolved by historical concepts under scrutiny. The true value of the historyof ideas, then, becomes apparent when 'we evaluate not only the historicalnovelty of the concepts created by a philosopher but also the power of theirbecoming when they pass into one ano ther'.7 If we wish to read Nietzsche as

a historian of ideas and by the standards he here defines, we will need toconsider the 'retroactive force' he is attempting to place upon the concepts ofGreek cu lture and thought, his concerns, the sun that shines in his world, and'what secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places' in order to greet thisnew light.

Even the most insightful readers of Nietzsche will lose sight of his meth-odology on occasion. Martin Heidegger has claimed, for example, thatNietzsche's reading of the pre-Platonic philosophers is 'commonplace, if notentirely superficial', in spite of having established a 'vibrant rapport withtheir personalities.81 will not quibble with Heidegger at this juncture. B ut themost significant point I wish to stress here is that we will need to remember toconsider how Nietzsche's classicism amounts to a criticism of his own times,how our examination of 'Nietzsche and the Greeks' is primarily a study ofNietzsche through his own attempts to study the Greeks. In doing so, we willask, 'how does Nietzsche's criticism set up a plane for bringing forth prob-lems not fully resolved in modernity's conceptual worldview?'

Nietzsche, of course, has not always been read with such sympathy, goingall the way back to the initial reactions of Nietzsche's contemporaries to hisfirst published work. The opening salvo in the Foreword of Nietzsche'ssecond 'untimely' meditation, and the analysis that follows therein, serve asNietzsche's justification for his own efforts in The irth of Tragedy toidentify the Greek form. With this salvo he seeks to define the standardscapable of measuring his own classicism: 'how has this study invigoratedlife?' Under such a measure, Nietzsche reflects on his work tirelessly,attempting to gain new vantage points for self-understanding and self-overcoming. The Foreword's conclusion holds one of the many statements of

purpose Nietzsche was fond of shaping for estimating the value of his work:'for I do not kn ow w ha t meaning classical studies could have for our time ifthey were not untimely - that is to say, acting counter to our time andthereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time tocome'.9 We find here, unambiguously, the standard by which to measureNietzsche's early work , and my study - like others before it - will attempt tobe sympathetic to these criteria.10

From Nietzsche's reflection here, and from others like it, two general


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questions have arisen to guide Nietzsche scholarship for the past century:'what is Nietzsche's critique of the culture of his time?' and 'how does hisunderstanding of classical studies make this critique possible?' Readers of

Nietzsche have called his work a Kulturkampf Yet, without the perspectiveafforded by time, commentators have not fully understood Nietzsche's'struggle' with the 'culture' of his contemporaries; as Nietzsche has said, thepassage of time and the various experiences and goals of the reader seem tobeg re-readings of important texts and events. Unfor tuna tely, more than theusual complications exacerbate our difficulty in understanding Nietzsche'sclassicism and its stated purpose. Our questions concerning Nietzsche'scultural critique, like those concerning what 'untimely' perspective he gainsby his inquiries, are congruent with the 'retroactive forces' Nietzsche applies

upon his own inquiries, the insights he gleans from them, and the forces theseexperiences bring to his later works. That is to say, as we attempt to identifyhow his experiences help fashion his portrait of 'the Greek way', and howthese 'Greeks' help form his later thoughts, we are also charged withreflecting on our own 'retroactive' roles in these exchanges. These relation-ships make Nietzsche studies a rather dynamic affair, as would seem to beindicated by the many commentaries regarding Nietzsche, his life, times,intellectual interests and influences, not to mention those regarding the fullwake of this watershed 'event' we have come to call 'Nietzsche'.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of Greek philosophy toNietzsche's critique of the nineteenth century and to his 'anticipation' ofwhat will become 'part of the consciousness of every thinking person' livingin the twentieth century.11 However, studies of his treatment of Greek cultureand philosophy have by no means exhausted Nietzsche's thoughts on thesesubjects. The academic tradition particularly needs to pay greater heed, itseems to me, to his division of culture and thought into representative modesthat reflect instincts identifiable as 'Greek' (or sometimes 'Hellenic') and 'un-Greek' (or sometimes 'un-Hellenic'). In some ways, Deleuze's description ofthe historical inquiries of Foucault apply also to Nietzsche, when Deleuzewrites,

what Foucault takes from history is that determination . . . unique to eachage which goes beyond any behavior, mentality, or set of ideas, since itmakes these things possible. But history responds only because Foucaulthas managed to invent . . . a properly philosophical form of interrogationwhich is itself new and which revives history.12

W e learn from Deleuze that Foucault proposes a new paradigm fo r analysingsocial and political institutions, one that envisions such institutions histori-cally and disparately, as responding in various ways to human socialrequirements as they are expressed throu gh localized arrangem ents o f power.According to Deleuze, Foucault recommends that we conceive of such dis-parate political formulations not merely as hierarchical structures with anoriginary locus of power, but rather as 'diagrams' in which the discernment


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CL SSIC L STU IES FOR THE BENEFIT OF TIME T O CO M E

and regulation of power becomes both enclosed and capable of beingarticulated. Deleuze adds that there are as many diagrams as there are socialfields in history ... if we consider ancient sovereign societies we can see that

they also possess a diagram .13

He laments, however, that Foucault rarelyexamines ancient sovereign societies , adding that such a study would offer a particularly good example of the new methodology that Foucaultemploys.

M y study will argue that Nietzsche plays the role of philosophical-historian by reconstructing a social and political diagram of that particular sovereign society which Nietzsche has identified with the Greeks of thetragic age. The more we learn about the various features of Nietzsche sstudies of modernity and the past, the more we can find out, and, indeed, the

more there seems to be to learn, about these fields. Although particularaspects of his studies have been thoroughly examined, I w ould argue tha t inorder more fully to grasp his engagement with the Greeks, and thus withmodernity, work remains to be done. I would even go so far as to add thatthe most significant problems and concepts arising in Nietzsche s philosophydeveloped through his engagement with Greek culture and thought and thatfor this reason studies of Nietzsche failing to take into account these prob-lems and concepts from their origins run the risk of misconceiving Nietz-sche s ideas by a considerable margin.

Nietzsche does not reject out of hand either the trad ition or modernity sinheritance of it. Yet he is driven by the spirit of liberation from mereinstruction, inspired, perhaps, by Emerson s manifestoes on scholarly inde-pendence, Schopenhauer s charisma and bravado, and Lange s intuitive,sweeping, historical narrative of the struggle between materialism and mys-ticism (which Nietzsche considered a true treasure to be read over and overagain ).14 The struggle to take invigoration from his studies compelledNietzsche to consider more than the usual kind of investigations captivatingthe n ineteenth-century philologist. The study of the past, for Nietzsche, mustinspire the inquirer to critique the present; whether that study is directed tolanguage, culture or art, as it had been in Nietzsche s early philologicalinquiries, or whether it is directed to the history of thought, as it increasinglywill become for him, a study of the past ought to offer the philologist, thecultural critic, the historian and the philosopher untimely perspectives fortheir critiques; and, by living with experiences gained from the untimelypoint of view, a study of the past ought to provide the critic with materialsnecessary for constructing the paths of the future.

By laying bare the structures of history in its various temporal modes,Nietzsche brings to light possibilities for history s uses and abuses . At aboutthe same time, he applies these strategies to his investigations of Greeksociety, of those philosophers emerging through it in the period thatNietzsche calls the tragic age . By identifying various formulations of thehuman being s instincts, the social forms they produce, society s exemplaryindividuals, and their beliefs, Nietzsche hopes to open up modernity spotential, to elevate the quality of the hum an being s life: not by relieving


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human suffering or by increasing our capacities to accumulate greater goodsat a greater frequency, but by cultivating our instincts to produce - throughthe social form, the exem plar, and our beliefs - the greatest flower our species

has ever thought possible. In order to grow in this fashion, Nietzsche argues ,we must admit what is necessary, remaining true to the earth and notretreating absent-mindedly into the imaginary world of made-up ideals. Wemust also recognize, moreover, that necessity has left open an exceedinglyrich and varied field of possibilities, were we creative and masterful enoughto tend it. Nietzsche studies what is necessary in order to diagnose thevarious manners modernity has inherited from its past, so that a betterunderstanding of what is possible will direct hum anity s actions in thefuture.

When historians of all types, in all the various fields of the human sci-ences, offer untimely responses to contemporary problems, they inevitablyreach conclusions about the past, present and future not shared by thepedestrian academic. While these kinds of responses make the critical his-torian s work useful, the untimely scholar, as a result of these inquiries, willoften incur the wrath of various academic communities, or so Nietzschewould seem to reason. The invigorated life, the life of a newly stimulatedand more fully aware state of consciousness , can be e xhilarating; it can alsobe perplexing and filled with disappointment. Nietzsche, it is often said, suffered with his thoughts.15 And his intellectual journey frequently tookhim, as he will later say, into the horizon of the infinite , far beyond theusual moorings that anchored the scholarship of his contemporaries. 16 Whileexhilarating indeed, this journe y did not always enhance the reputation of thejunior faculty member at the University of Basel, still contemplating a careerin academics.

By the time his second untimely meditation reached publication,Nietzsche was indeed experiencing grave professional difficulties. Not onlydid he find a particularly icy reception among st his profe ssional peers for TheBirth of Tragedy but his faltering reputation as a scholar emptied hisclassrooms of prospective students. To add to his woes, his increasinginterest in the history of thought, which in the early to mid-1870s directedhim to examine the philosophy of the tragic age , and which inspired him toproduce an extended essay concerning the pre-Socratic philosophers, wasthwarted by the very person young Nietzsche most wished to impress - hisfriend, mentor and confidant, Richard Wagner, who persuaded him to take adifferent tack. Rather than holding out hope for the development of a work

on Greece s earliest philosophers, Nietzsche (under Wagne r s counsel) nolonger expected such an inquiry to be published. The remnants of this essay,we might add, would be retrieved only later by the executors of Nietzsche sestate, and published under the title Philosophy in the Tragic Age of theGreeks. At this still impre ssionable age , Nietzsche was persuaded by Wagnerto develop instead a rather vindictive article targeting the essayist DavidStrauss, published as David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer inUntimely Meditations.


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CL SSIC L STUDIES FOR THE BENEFIT OF TIME TO COME 9

How should this essay be situated, philosophically, in the early develop-ment of N ietzsche s though t-path? The diatribe against Strauss targets themodernist for possessing neither the interpretive skill of a culture-prophet

nor the capacity for self-critical exam ination. In N ietzsche s eyes, Strauss isthat kind of man, representative of modernity, who lacks the all-important untimely view. The essay, hence, gives readers an indication of the kind ofobjections Nietzsche would raise against the commonplace voices of his day(in all honesty, how ever, the essay does not represent Nietzsche s best work ,being itself a bit too timely despite its intentions). While Strauss claims to bea classic prose w riter , he fails to reach Nietzsche s lofty expectations of w hatsuch a form would require. Strauss, according to Nietzsche, merely inheritsthe literary mannerisms of the English and French Enlightenments, whileproposing to set German culture on a new course of self-awareness. That onewould misunderstand the Greeks, Nietzsche believes, by reading them asprototypes of the European Enlightenment would mean that one reads themin ways consistent with the norms of the times, and so Nietzsche s strugglehere concerns Strauss only by happenstance.

How did a modernist such as Strauss misunderstand the Greeks? InChapter Two, I will examine Nietzsche s struggle against eighteenth- andnineteenth-century conventional readings of the Greeks, by showing howthese conventions initially formed in w orks such as that by Johann Winck-elmann and by discussing what is at stake in this struggle for N ietzsche: w hatit entails and what significance it could have to his critique of m odernity.

Even if Strauss indeed has corrupted German culture w ith the style of theEuropean materialists and proves to be, in N ietzsche s words, a culturalphilistine , it must be admitted that his real mistake seems to have been tohave provoked Wagner with his popularity amo ng the Germans and thus tohave made himself the target of a lackey.17 Nevertheless, N ietzsche s hostil-ities, here directed against all things Straussian , against contemporary

scholarship, German culture and the vulgar philistine , are all related to hisgeneral assault on the worldview that supports modernism, the age of sci-ence, herd-morality, Christianity, Platonism and Socratic anti-Hellenism .These general themes are consistent in all of his claims against modernity,but they may not be entirely explicable if the assault itself is not fullyunderstood, as it cannot be if readers were to rely solely on the most well-known texts in Nietzsche s corpus and to ignore the studies that first broughthis critique of modernity to boil - or so I will argue.Nietzsche s Kulturkampf is complex, and without the help of his entirebody of work , even Nietzsche s best-know n critiques have proven difficult todecipher fully. We can point, for example, to the well-know n claims m ade inTwilight of the Idols: that Socrates anti-Hellenic enmity towards nobletastes were exhibited in Socrates new type of agon ; that this agon isfounded upon ressentiment ; tha t Socrates also harboured enmity against theAthenian man of distinction; that such an agon was found persuasive mostlyby those citizens against whom it was surreptitiously directed - the aristo-cratic Athenians, including Plato; that the aristocratic class s countenance


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with Socrates betrays a state of emergency in the Hellenic world; and thatthis countenance also shows a state in which the Greek instincts are nolonger believed reliable. 18 However familiar such arguments might sound to

the general reader of Nietzsche, and however effectively readers can interpretthem w ithin equally familiar frames of reference (such as the ones providedby The Birth of Tragedy , we should be willing to admit, at the very least, thata more detailed description of Nietzsche s thought will disclose previouslyoverlooked nuances in claims such as these. Surely, then, the same can besaid about Nietzsche s earliest meditations.

So w e can suggest, for example, that despite the embarrassing tone of theassault on Strauss, perhaps Nietzsche s theoretical justifications for thisassault can be proven well founded if we were to attempt to understand theargument from the standpoint of Nietzsche s concerns at the time. As withhis arguments for validating a radically new interpretation of Greek tragedy ,and as with those for examining what in Nietzsche s time was a relativelyobscure topic for a philologist, the Greek philosophers of the tragic age , therationale for Nietzsche s diatribe against Strauss can be founded uponNietzsche s affinity for employing the untimely perspective as a means forlevelling critiques against his own time. But, can w e say w ith confidence w hatit means, for Nietzsche, to have an untimely perspective of modernity ?

How does classical, historical scholarship relate to modem cultural criti-cism? While the timbre of Nietzsche s general critique is rarely vague, the fullmeasure of its scope proves difficult to grasp. Exotic and colourful seedlingsfrom an unknown source and of an unknown character frequently seem tosprout unexpectedly from Nietzsche s fertile mind. Such flourishes are fre-quently difficult to in tegrate, seeming to resist them atic cohesion. To be sure,this difficulty is related partly to the manner in which these works wereoriginally published. The Birth o f Tragedy and the series of essays publishedas the Untimely Meditations were in p rint during Nietzsche s lifetime. Phi-

losophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, on the other hand, was publishedoriginally under the direction of Nietzsche s sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, usually considered a dubious editor by current Nietzsche scholars.Still, this particular essay on the Greek philosophers, although hastily con-structed and abruptly abandoned, has been well known to the generalNietzsche reader for quite some tune. Therefore, even this text, one mightrightly expect, has been analysed closely. These works and a few assortedessays taken from th e notebooks make up the general frame of reference formost interpretations of Nietzsche s early thoughts .

What is not as well known, nor as thoroughly analysed, is the treasuretrove of lecture notes, assorted essays, and other materials Nietzsche pro-duced during h is time as a professor in Basel during the early to mid-1870s.Admittedly, some of these treasures were scribbled out in fleeting mom entsof inspiration, and perhaps we should not rely too heavily upon any parti-cular one of them as the sole source of a radicalized interpretation ofNietzsche s thoug ht. What seems clear to me, at least, is that th e bounty ofthought Nietzsche had amassed in this early period would directly influence


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his most well-known work in the 1880s. Some of these under-valued mat-erials, furthermore, were not at all produced in momentary flashes ofinspiration, nor were they scribbled out in hastily prepared essays. Rather,

they were in fact crafted very carefully by Nietzsche as he prepared them forhis lectures at the University of Basel, or as he collected them as part of someother sustained inquiry.19 As odd as it may sound, then, and in spite of thefact that there has been no shortage of Nietzsche scholarship during the lastthirty years, work remains to be done to comprehend these under-appreciated materials and integrate them into an understanding of the fullbody of Nietzsche s thought.

My analysis will begin by emphasizing moments and trends in the philo-sophy and culture of the ancients which Nietzsche himself laboured toemphasize, and will proceed by framing within the context of this newemphasis some of the best-known, but still not completely understood claimsput forth by Nietzsche in his later works. In this manner, I will attempt tocontribute to our understanding of the untimely perspective Nietzsche hasgleaned from his classical studies and of how this perspective m akes pos-sible not only his critique of the culture of his tune, but also his aspirationsfor a time to come .

On the uses and abuses of Greek thought for Me

Although Philosophy in the Tragic ge of the Greeks played to an indifferentaudience, and although this reception diverted whatever expectationsNietzsche may have harboured for the publication of such an inquiry,Nietzsche s interest in the ancient Greek philosophers remained robust, asexaminations of his private notebooks have shown. In the w ork that follows.I will analyse some of these early unpublished materials, focusing at times

upon a collection of lectures that Nietzsche prepared fo r delivery at theUniversity of Basel.20 These lectures were given in separate courses on thepre-Platonic philosophers, and they offer important insights into Nietzsche sintellectual development. They will thus serve as touchstones for my inter-pretation of Nietzsche s work . Occasionally, my analysis will considersources which influenced Nietzsche s understanding of ancient thought andthe philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, acknowledgingNietzsche s place in an academic discourse, notwiths tanding his concertedattempts to achieve the untimely perspective of a critical historian.

The topics I will bring to light reflect upon Nietzsche s uses and critiques ofdiverse speculative accounts of power, force, natural selection, mechanicalnecessity, materialism and other ancient and contemporary theories relatedto the natural sciences. While these themes have guided the works ofNietzsche scholars such as George Stack, Greg Whitlock and others, theywill most often reside in the background of my discussion. I will consider,more directly, Nietzsche s interpre tation and, at times, h is appropriation ofancient theories regarding physical phenomena, social necessity, political


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moods and individual dispositions. We will see that under Nietzsche sdirection, ancient philosophy responds to questions related to purpose,meaning, natural laws, identity and the natures of being and becoming. A s I

reconsider the problems of identity and variation that w ere introduced in theprevious section s discussion of history , extending my focus to problemsconcerning the form and becoming as such, my analysis will also bebrought to bear upon Nietzsche s attitudes regarding how knowledge isdetermined, attitudes that have perplexed Nietzsche scholars past andpresent.

I should pause here to note one point of interest concerning Nietzsche sepistemological focus: Walter Kaufmann s seminal work on Nietzschemarked a new beginning in Nietzsche scholarship, especially in the UnitedStates, and the work is mostly sympathetic to a philosopher whose reputa-tion had been sullied in that country.2 1 Yet even Kaufmann argues in thisstudy that Nietzsche never fully developed an epistemology, while admittinghowever that relevant material [concerning Nietzsche s theory of know ledge]remained in his notebooks .2 2 Kaufmann w as never particularly sympatheticto interpretations of Nietzsche that relied heavily on the posthumouslypublished notebooks, nor was he particularly helpful in facilitating thetranslation and publication of a complete edition of Nietzsche s w orks.23 But,

in his Forew ord to Daniel Breazeale s important collection and translation ofa few selections from these notebooks, Kaufmann acknowledges thatNietzsche shows us why

some of the most crucial problems regarding know ledge become clear onlywhen we relate knowledge and science to art, morality, and life. This,according to Nietzsche, can be done especially well w hen w e focus on theancient Greeks and contrast what he called the pre-Platonic philosopherswith Plato and subsequent Western Philosophers.24

I agree w ith Ka ufm ann here that Nietzsche interweaves what he consideredto be the problems of knowledge with difficulties usually considered to bethe bailiwick of various distinct disciplines, and that for Nietzsche theseproblems become clearer once the historian of Western thought gains thedesired untimely perspective, produced by the proper study of antiquity.Kaufmann w as unable or unwilling, however, to consider fully Nietzsche sdevelopment of an epistemology in these pre-Platonic lectures, or in the otherparts of the achlass where this development is particularly evident. More-over, I find the arguments of Whitlock, the English translator of the pre-Platonic lectures, to be persuasive when he claims that the academic com-munity as a w hole has failed to properly consider the Basel Vorlesungen at itsow n peril.2 51 will take K aufm ann s cue, then, as the general rationale for thework that follows and focus on Nietzsche s reading of the pre-Platonicphilosophers, relating this reading to N ietzsche s analysis of Plato, which Iwill derive in part from his lectures on Plato delivered in the same period. 26

Also, I will consider the more fam iliar essays Nietzsche prepared during this


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The Greek way and the untimely v i w

Nietzsche saw the beginning of the W estern tradition s intellectual devel-opment as a s truggle, pitting on one side, the worldviews of the pre-Platonicphilosophers, which only in a few respects formed a coherent univocal sys-tem, being marked most apparently by important character-defining dis-tinctions. With these worldviews the pre-Platonic philosophers set themselvesapart from the ordinary rung of humanity, and by accomplishing this feat

time, including those on the Greek State and on Homer s Competition .(These early essays have been available in various editions fo r some timenow.)

Nietzsche s critical interests included ancient and modern aesthetics, lit-erature, the individual, the state, the histories of though t, rhetoric, moralityand science, and he had a unique ability to interconnect these interests in atruly interdisciplinary way. Indeed, it would be more proper to say, perhaps,that Nietzsche was unable to disconnect these interests, so richly developedare even his most narrowly focused investigations. Moreover, I believe thatNietzsche, because of his extraordinary willingness and ability to engagehonestly the intellectual problems of his times and to consider fully theirpotential consequences on our century and beyond, is a significant figure forscholars w orking today in all fields of the human sciences.

The present, introductory comments will be followed by four additionalchapters. Chapter Two will attempt to identify the untimely perspective assuch, asking what benefit could the critic o f modernity gain by forming sucha v antage point? This chapter will survey Nietzsche s interest in Greekculture and philosophy, identifying those components characteristic of ahealthy culture and the roles of the philosopher, the sage, the genius and allforms of the exemplary type of individual. I will also examine here Nietz-sche s struggle against the scholars of his time and suggest what is at stake insuch struggles. The third chapter will ask what benefits did the Greeks enjoywith the formation o f a true culture? , ana lysing Nietzsche s contentions thatthe Greeks were generally healthy and that the moderns are not. Thischapter will focus on the pressures of science and related technologies onsocieties, noting the function of the exemplar fo r directing society s intel-lectual forces, for mitigating their potentially deleterious effects, and forpromoting the hum an being s prospects in this way for a meaningful andpurposeful existence. Chapter Three will find that the Greek w orld s geniuses

successfully appropriated Hellenic instincts for the better, e levating hum an-ity s potential fo r greatness, developing the species through the Greek form .Chapter Four will examine the structures that make such variations pos-sible, connecting the characteristic manners of the Greek philosopher withNietzsche s own principle of the doc trine of pow er. Chapter Five will attemptto show how all of these themes came to fruition in N ietzsche s exam inationof Heraclitus.

13


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Nietzsche considers them ideal character-types - boundary stones' Grenzsteineri), as he calls them.27 In this one significant respect, then, theywere united: each noteworthy pre-Platonic philosopher contributed to Hel-

lenic culture's greatness by creating a unique standpoint from which to viewthe chaotic mass of existence. In doing this, they serve Nietzsche as moralexemplars for all hum anity, because, as he claims, this service - whether wereceive it from the pre-Platonic philosophers or from elsewhere - has thegreatest significance to the preservation of the species. The follow ing passagefrom The Gay Science emphasizes this service especially well:

The strongest and the most evil spirits have so far done the most toadvance humanity; again and again they relumed the passions that weregoing to sleep - all ordered society puts the passions to sleep - and theyreawakened again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, ofthe pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they compelled men to pitopinion against opinion, model against model. Usually by force of arms,by toppling boundary stones Grenzsteine), by vio lating pieties - but alsoby means of new religions and moralities.28

In Nietzsche's reading, Greek culture, like all flourishing types, understoodthe need for meaning, purpose, direction and goals, and responded to thisneed by 'toppling boundary stones', yes, but also by constructing 'new reli-gions and moralities'. Indeed, both responses are the function of suchartistic, philosophical visions affected as they were in the age of Greektragedy.

These visions as such are oftentimes highly specious, of course, and per-haps none is more so today than the pre-Platonic formal theories of naturalphenomena, many of w hich seem neither obv iously true nor verifiable withany secure method of proof. Physical theories such as these may appear

rather comical and 'buffoonish',,29

and they are relatively innocuous, at leastwhen confined only to natural phenomena. But, any physical theory thattransforms a people, which takes root in its instincts for developing goals andmeaningful standards, will put this people in danger of having its culturalidentity stripped, Nietzsche argues, because physical theories, when they arenot controlled by a greater artistic initiative, tend to write off the poeticaland mythical visions which have given a people its form.30 Modem scientifictheories, by themselves, had by the nineteenth century proved incapable ofsustaining a culture, in Nietzsche's view, and they had also become highlyproblematic by that time, having taken root in the instincts of Westernculture. In Chapter Three of my text, I will argue that as Nietzsche examinesthe philosophy of the Greeks, he learns something significant about thechallenges tha t ensue w hen cultures transform their w orldview s: science andrelated technologies frequently bring insurm ountable pressures on prevailingcultural narratives, affecting the dispositions of individuals and wholesocieties in indelible ways. The pre-Platonic age did not fall into decline,Nietzsche contends, w hen it transformed the values of its ancestors. How did


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it avoid such a decline? According to Nietzsche, the G reek world mastered itstheories on nature with aesthetic principles seated deeply in its own culturalideals.

Now a similar challenge has returned to modernity, as the age of sciencethreatens to write off the once stable myths of Christianity and to leave theW est in a state of paralysis. W hile this movement is inevitable given the stateof all ideologies, and while a healthy society will seek to transvalue even itsmost important values when circumstances require change, modernity sinability to meet this challenge effectively speaks volumes about its weak-nesses. This defect may also prove, ultim ately, to cause its ruin , leaving mostpeople with only the difficult choice of retreating to the clearly unw orkableand pessimistic ideologies of the past, or of sceptically rejecting all meaning-inspiring visions of purpose. In this sense, the modern scientific worldview,Nietzsche argues, has destabilized Western culture itself, a consequence thatis not necessarily negative, given the pessimism of the Platonic worldview.But, having taken root in the instincts of a people, the scientific perspectivethreatens to leave the West without a will to create for itself and for itsparticipants an identity -forming purpose. Recognizing the stress placed uponthe W est s social norm s in religion, morali ty, art , politics, science andthought, Nietzsche sees in the nineteenth century an opportunity to elevatehuman potential with a new kind of n arrative. This opportunity, however, isaccompanied by the danger of failure, which will surely be the result if theWest pessimistically refuses to face this challenge, retreating from the task, orif it lacks the mastery to rise above the lowest forms of its desires.

Observing that the pre-Platonic era effectively met the crisis of meaningand purpose that developed in its own age of science, Nietzsche uses the pre-Platonic philosophers as boundary stones to measure his own steps acrossthe turbulent stream of the nineteenth century, hoping for a time whenmodernity, too, will rise to its potential. This is what we learn, it seems to me,

by focusing upon Nietzsche s early studies of the Greeks, seeing the themesand concerns principal to his mature work as they begin to form. For thesereasons, I will contest firmly held notions regarding Nietzsche s views ontru th and society. As forms, neither tru ths nor societies are absolute; they donot precede human participation; and, like the h istorian s accounts of thepast, both truth and society admit to considerable variations of form. All ofthis is clear. But some readings of Nietzsche misunderstand the places oftruth and society in Nietzsche s thought. Both kinds of forms are necessaryto human striving and they may even facilitate the elevation of the humanbeing when not abused - that is to say, when they are made useful for such apurpose. Hence, it would be incorrect to argue, as it commonly is, thatNietzsche s epistemological aim is reducible to scepticism , or that Nietz-sche s occupations wi th individualism lack consideration for the socialform.

The nature of forms and their variations as such will be the focus ofChapter Four of my text. There, I will argue tha t Nietzsche s early studies ofthe Greeks uncover important features in the concept he will later formulate


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as will to power . When seen from the vantage point of his w ork on the pre-Platonic philosophers, these featu res disclose Nietzsche s will to power asm ore than an observation on the nature of m atter and m otion, m ore than an

extension of the Darw inism pervading nineteenth-century thought, and m oreeven than an indulgence in the struggle for dominance by each against all.The Greeks, Nietzsche discovered, organized their lives with practices thatdiffered radically from the ones enacted in the Platonic and Christian viewsof the w orld. At tim es, Nietzsche refers to these practices by the general label formal variation , and it serves Nietzsche as one of the most importantattributes of the Greek way . He claims later that formal variation accountsfor the hum an being s appropriation of the will to power and our partici-pation in it.

The Greeks acted in this m anner , for example, by recognizing the necessityof struggle and the way of power, not by retreating from physis. They alsodiscovered ways of formally varying this necessity, thus creating opportu-nities to elevate themselves, and, seizing these opportunities, they sublim elyre-inscribed these variations with the agonal instinct, even as they foughtagainst the most barbaric and deleterious form s of struggle. As im portant aswhat the Greeks did in response to the crisis of meaning and purpose, theresult of his early inquiries that most inspires Nietzsche is the recognition ofthose conditions through which the Greeks found it possible to preserve andto promote the health and development of their kind. These conditionsinclude a particular m ental capacity that he attem pts to recapture later in hisconceptualization of the free spirit . M ost im portantly, Nietzsche fashionedan untimely view of modernity by observing the way that the Greeksrecognized, appropriated and participated in the structures of formal var-iation. This untimely view is what Nietzsche attempts to recapture in hisexpressions of a doctrine of power.

In Chapter Five we find Nietzsche s attunement w ith those tasks he sets

forth in the Untimely M editation s essay on History . As he studies theancient philosopher Heraclitus, one senses his feelings of kinship for hissubject, the self-reflection tha t such a study inspires, the invigoration itbrings for life , and the impact - for the benefit of a tim e to come - it willlater have on Nietzsche s thought.

Notes

1. Nietzsche, Unt imely Meditations trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995), p. 59. This edition of Nietzsche s work shall hereinafter be cited as UM . Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, eds Giorgio Colli andMazzino Montinari, 15 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), Vol. 1, p. 245. This editionof Nietzsche s work shall hereinafter be cited as KSA .

2. For a lucid discussion of the challenges by Nietzsche s Birth of Tragedy posed toGerman academia (especially to the traditional Altertumwissenscha.fi) and of the critiqueslevelled against Nietzsche s challenges by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and otherssee Robert Sullivan s Political Hermeneutics (University Park, PA and London:


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Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 33ff . References to The Birth of Tragedy willhereinafter be cited as BT.

3. UM 122/KSA1.333.4. UM 61/KSA1.249.5. UM 94/KSA1.294.6. Translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), aphorism 34. This

edition of Nietzsche s work will hereinafter be cited as GS . KSA3.404. Note alsoNietzsche s refutation of objectivity in modern historiography in the Third Essay fromOn the G enealogy of Morality, ed . Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 123. This edition of Nietzsche s text will hereinafterbe cited as GM . KSA5.405-8.

7. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinsonand Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 32.

8. Martin Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment , in Early Greek Thinking, trans.David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1984), p. 14.

9. UM 60/KSA1.247. Herman Siemens has claimed that in this particular passagewe find the hallmark .. . of Nietzsche s thought throughout the early 1870s: critique of thepresent, and engagement with Greek culture as a standard of critique . Siemens then liststhe usual texts in which this hallmark is evident, most notably The Birth of Tragedy andUM. while omitting the materials that will serve as the foundation of m y study ( AgonalConfigurations in the Unzeitgemdsse Betrochtungen , in Nietzsche Studies eds GunterAbel, Joseph Simon and Werner Stegmaier, Vol. 30 [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001], pp.80-106). The Nietzsche Studien will hereinafter be cited as NS .

10 . In a sense, I will conduct my study of Nietzsche s thoughts on Greek culture andthe pre-Platonic philosophers with the same sympathies I have found, for example, incommentaries on Nietzsche s lectures on rhetoric. See Sander L. Oilman, Carole Blair andDavid J. Parent, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1989); for a similarly motivated overview of these lectures, their significancein modern theories of rhetoric, and their re-emergence in twentieth-century discourses onlanguage theories see Ernst Behler s Nietzsches Studium der griechsen Rhetorik nach derKGW , NS, eds Gunter Abel, Jorg Salaquarda and Josef Simon, Vol. 27 (Berlin: Walter deGruyter, 1998), pp. 1-12.

11. R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy (Baton Rouge, LA:Louisiana State University Press, 1965), p. 87.

12. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinnesota Press, 1988), pp. 48-9.

13 . Ibid., p. 34.14. Nietzsche comments upon his relationship to Schopenhauer, but leaves his debts

to Emerson and Lange for the scholars to document. For a brief but insightful account ofNietzsche s affinity for Emerson, see Kaufmann s Introduction to GS (pp. 7-13). For alonger study of this attraction, see George J. Stack s Nietzsche and Em erson: n ElectiveAffinity (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1993). Nietzsche enthusiastically recom-mends Lange s Geschichte des M aterialismus, a book that delivers infinitely more than thetitle promises , to school-chum Carl von Gersdorff in a letter dated 16 February 1868.Nietzsche. Samtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, eds Giorgio Colli and MazzinoMontinari Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), Vol. 2, p. 257. This edition of Nietzsche sletters will hereinafter be cited as KSAB . For studies outlining the relationship betweenthe inquiries of Nietzsche and Lange, see Jorg Salaquarda, Nietzsche und Lange , inNietzsche Studien, eds Ernst Behler, Mazzino Montinari, Wolfgang Miiller-Lauter andHeinz Wenzel, Vol. 7 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), pp. 236-60; Der Standpunkt desIdeals bei Lange und Nietzsche , in Studi Tedeschi, XXII, 1 (1979), p. 142; and Stack sLange and N ietzsche (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993).


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15. Consider, for example, this fairly typical account of Nietzsche s overall worldviewfrom Julian Young s Nietzsche s Philosophy of Art: by the time he came to write thepreface to The Gay Science he could see no solution to the pain of existence other thanprofound superficiality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 139.

16. GS 124/KSA3.480.17 After noting some rather embarrassing letters written in servile praise of the

master by Nietzsche to his friends, Hollingdale suggests that the vindictive tone of theStrauss essay, and indeed the target himself, are consequences of Wagner s momentarydifficulties in securing funds necessary for building the Bayreuth Festival Theatre and ofthe German public s enthusiasm instead for Strauss book The Old Faith and the New(Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy, pp. 108-20).

18 Nietzsche, The Problem of Socrates , in Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hol-lingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 29-44 (this edition of Nietzsche s workshall hereinafter be cited as TI )/KSA6.67-73.

19. For instance, as part of a more general study that Breazeale and others haveidentified as Nietzsche s Philosopher s Book . Daniel Breazeale (ed. and trans.) Philosophyand Truth: Selections from Nietzsche s Notebooks of the Early 1870s (New Jersey:Humanities Press, 1979), xxii. This edition of Nietzsche s text will hereinafter be cited as Breazeale .

20. Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, eds Fritz Bornmann and MarioCarpitella (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995). This edition of Nietzsche sworks shall hereinafter be cited as KGW , with references to the specific text as required(most often Section II Volume 4).

21. The distortion of Nietzsche s thoughts in the days before Kaufmann had beencarried out by so-called Nazi scholars like Alfred Baumler and others, who used Nietz-sche s legacy dishonestly, for the purposes of propaganda. Unfortunately, this distortionwas facilitated by the executors of Nietzsche s works, led by his sister, the aforementionedElizabeth Forster-Nietzsche. The distortion brought against Nietzsche s reputation in theUnited States by the pulp-fiction My Sister and I which Kaufmann thankfully dismissed,is another matter altogether, but such an outrageous work demonstrates the degree towhich Nietzsche s name had been besmirched in the mid-twentieth century.

22 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York:Vintage, 1968), 3rd edition, p. 204.

23. Peter Heller, for example, notes that Kaufmann actually impeded efforts topublish Nietzsche s full corpus in one collected work, hinting that Kaufmann had financialand other personal reasons for constructing such impediments. Heller also notes thatKaufmann originally had a low estimation of even Colli and Montinari s KSA, whichpreceded the KGW. See Why Translate All of Nietzsche , NS, Vol. 27 (1998), pp. 13-22.

24 Walter Kaufmann, foreword to Breazeale, p. x.25. Greg Whitlock edits and translates Die vorplatonischen Philosophen in excerpts

of KGW 114 in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University ofIllinois Press, 2001), p. xvii. This text will hereinafter be cited as PPP .

26. KGW 114: Einfuhrung in das Studium der platonischen Dialoge , Ueber PlatonsLeben und Schriften , Ueber Platons Leben und Lehre and Einleitung in das StudiumPlatons .

27 See, fo r example, Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans.Marianne Cowan (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 1962), pp. 46 and 69 (this editionof Nietzsche s text will hereinafter be cited as PTG )/KSA1.818 and 836. Nietzsche mayhave derived this curious moniker from the ancient system of using boundary stones tomark off that portion of the aristocrat s land to be cultivated by the lower classes for thearistocrat s interest - in a kind of indentured servitude. Terry Buckley notes that theseboundary stones (horoi) served as constant reminders of the division between the common


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CLASSICAL STUDIES FOR TH E BENEFIT OF A TIME TO COME 19

people plethoroi) and the notables gnorimoi) and for this reason contributed to socialtension which ultimately led to the democratic reforms of Solon Aspects of Greek History750-323 BC [London and New York: Routledge, 1996], p. 94). For a discussion of thesignificance of the boundary stone in ancient Greek laws of agriculture see Buckley,Chapter 5. See also Solon fragment Diehls 24 in Greek Lyrics trans. Richmond Lattimore(Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 22; and the Aristoteliandocument The Athenian Constitution (D. 12.4), trans P. J. Rhodes (New York: Penguin,1984), p. 52.

28 GS 4/KSA3.376.29 On the comical nature of worldviews as such see GS 1/KSA3.369.30 This is a principal theme of selections collected from Nietzsche s notebooks of the

summer of 1872 to the beginning of 1873 under the title The Philosopher: Reflections onthe Struggle Between Art and Knowledge (Breazeale 3-58). Breazeale worked primarilyfrom Nietszches Gesammelte Werke, eds Max and Richard Oehler, 23 vols (Munich:Musarion, 1920-29). This collection of Nietzsche s works is commonly referred to as theMusarionausgabe and will hereinafter be cited as MA . The essay cited above is found inVol VI.3-64.


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2 Who are Nietzsche s Greeks?

/ do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if theywere not untimely - that is to say acting counter to our time and therebyacting on our time and let us hope for the benefit of a time to come.1

Classical studies and modernity

In this chapter I will examine Nietzsche s attempt to fuse his studies of

antiquity with his critique of modernity. It seems to me that quite a bit ofwork remains to be done in Nietzsche scholarship to probe his contentionthat the classicist s inquiries could have any value at all to the culturalphysician. I will work, therefore, towards situating Nietzsche s study of theGreeks in the context of a European cultural crisis. In what follows I willargue that in spite of what some might view as a kind of bookish, pedanticinterest in the Greeks - occasionally leading Nietzsche into debate withtraditional classical scholarship over seemingly minor details - his primarygoal for these studies is anything bu t bookish and pedantic. It is nothingshort of the wholesale transvaluation of modernity. I will begin therefore bylooking at Nietzsche s tactics for advancing such a critique, while later I w illmove to survey Nietzsche s broadly sketched outline of the most importantcharacteristics of Greek culture.

Looking back upon Nietzsche s thought, now from beyond the twentiethcentury, w e can easily see in it evidence of the general anxiety felt by manypeople about the state of European culture in the nineteenth century andwarning signs of the tumult to come. In the nineteenth century, untested


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W HO ARE NIETZSCHE S GREEKS? 21

ideologies abounded, centring on newly formed concepts of the nation-state,industrialization and the realities of a burgeoning, complex Western econ-omy. By the 1870s, Europe and most of the West had awakened to the fact

that the world was changing on several fronts. Many people felt a growingsense of unease about the transform ations that dislocated them from the oldways, brought on by political and cultural turmoil in Europe that alsoseemed to threaten the individual s sense of place and identity. As a com m onoccurrence, the individual living in Europe saw national boundaries rede-fined, political parties overthrown, and the dislocation of even the mostfundamental ideologies once defining the meaning and purpose of the indi-vidual s life. Moreover, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European cul-tural identities were being dismantled and hastily reworked in the flood ofthis social change, and with all this upheaval came challenges to the m eansby which Europeans had come to understand themselves as individualsrelating to a unifying social framework.

To m any Europeans, tim e seemed out of join t. These social changes tendedto fragment societies into individuals and factions who could see themselvesonly as independent constituents of a random collection of bodies having nointernal coherence or order and as agents w hose primary interests necessarilyconflicted with the interests of others. In this social climate Nietzsche per-ceived modem culture to be disintegrating.2 As a reaction to this growingsense of dislocation, m any people in Europe, and especially in the German-speaking provinces, felt that a new form of cultural identity needed to bearticulated and promoted. Some had argued that the cultural architects ofthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not always up to this challenge.Often, the reformers of m odernity s new cultural identities, working in theenvironment of a newly intensified historical consciousness, attemptedmerely to recapture links to a past imagined to be more firmly grounded,only to find that the old concepts in their previous state were no longer

reliable in the new social reality. In such a manner, German scholars, artistsand philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries oftentimeslooked to the Greeks for models of imitation and for sources of self-knowledge.

In a sense, Nietzsche s classicism w as similarly m otivated. To be sure,Nietzsche was cautious to measure his claims about the value of scholarshipfor uncovering the m eans to develop a new cultural iden tity in the West. Inan often repeated refrain in his early w orks, Nietzsche cautions that a carefulstudy of the Greeks should work counter to the nineteenth century, becausethe Greeks must appear strange to us. In Birth of Tragedy for example,Nietzsche refutes A. W. Schlegel s attem pt to characterize the chorus inGreek tragedy as the ideal spectator , because such a concept merely reflects the truly German predilection fo r everything that is called ideal .3 W hat ismost astonishing about the performance-spectator relationship, Nietzscheargues, is the totally different nature of the Greek chorus, when comparedto the well-known theatre audiences of modern Europe. The Greeks,moreover, had neither the noble simplicity nor the quiet grandeur that


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noted eighteenth-century classicist Johann Winckelmann had imagined, andfor this reason, Nietzsche insists, modern Europe could not simply imitatethe Greeks , as previous cultural therapies had prescribed. 4 Nor would imi-

tation bring about the kind of personal transform ation sought by theEnlightenment, nor could it return the soul to its natural beauty , nor couldthe individual living in modem society become a rule unto oneself simply byimitating the ways of the past. 5 Within this discourse, rooted in Enlight-enment theories of natural law and autonomy , W inckelmann had definedthe basic attitudes of the Germans towards the Greeks of antiquity. ContraWinckelmann and the Enlightenment, Nietzsche argues that Greek culturehad developed in very close proximity to the barbarity, violence and crueltyof its past:

Thus the Greeks, the most humane people of ancient time, have a trait ofcruelty, of tiger-like pleasures in destruction . . . their whole history, andalso their mythology, must strike fear in us when we approach them withthe emasculated concept of modern humanity . . . for us, even Achilles[abuse of the corpse of Hector] has something offensive and horrific aboutit. Here we look into the abysses of hatred. With the same sensation, weobserve the bloody insatiable mutual laceration of two Greek factions.. .6

The cultural distance between antiquity and modernity challenges a criticalhistorian such as Nietzsche, who conscientiously wishes to avoid mystifyingthe past in a cloak of superstition about human nature. Rather than trying toevoke a return to the past, Nietzsche s attention to the Greeks resemblesmore the interests of the cultural anthropologist who wishes to uncoverformal differences in manners indicating the development of the humanbeing s instincts for personal identity and social unity. In what follows, Iwant to examine Nietzsche s various strategies for critiquing nineteenth-

century Europe and for influencing its future. Such strategies includesearching the past for discontinuities in thought and for paradigmatic shiftsthat are at once informative and inspirational. These strategies compelledNietzsche to look first of all for differences between the Greeks and mod-ernity, and he found such differences in the Greeks fondness for cruelty andaggression:

that the Greek regarded a full release of his hatred as a serious necessity; atsuch moments pent-up, swollen sensation found relief: the tiger chargedout, wanton cruelty flickering in its terrible eyes. Why did the Greeksculpture repeatedly have to represent war and battles with endless repe-tition, human bodies stretched out, their veins taut with hatred or thearrogance of triumph, the wounded doubled up, the dying in agony?7

Nietzsche s answer to this question reflects a vision of the work of the Greeksculptor which differs radically from Winckelmann s vision of Laocoon,whose agonized face and twisted posture reveal only a quiet grandeur .8


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WHO ARE NIETZSCHE'S GREEKS?

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conventions about 'Greek nobility ,according to N ietzsche, grossly misrepresented who the Greeks really were intheir most prosperous times,9 because these conventions failed to take into

account their nearness to the warlike nature of their ancestors and the effectsof this immediacy upon the instincts of the Homeric and tragic ages:

Why did the whole Greek world rejoice over the pictures of battle in theIliad? I fear we have not understood these in a sufficiently 'Greek' way,(nicht griechischgenug verstehen) and even that we w ould shudder if weever did understand them in a Greek way (einmal griechisch).10

Nietzsche often refers to a characteristically 'Greek' way or manner. Whatwould it mean, one might ask, to understand the Greeks 'in a Greek way ?W hat advantages might be gained from such an understanding? I believe thatif we look at the intellectual relationship early Nietzsche develops with theGreek philosophers, we will discover the guiding problems motivating agood deal of Nietzsche s later work. We may also find, it seems to me, notonly precursors to the resolutions Nietzsche identifies for such problems, butalso the early emergence of those problem-solving strategies that marks thedevelopment of his whole philosophical journey. We have already located

one such strategy when we noted Nietzsche s emphasis on the distancebetween modernity and antiquity, and in a moment we will look at another.For now we can reiterate Nietzsche s belief that if properly recognized, thedistance between the Greeks and modernity offers the classicist a new per-spective with which to better understand culture as such. I will argue thatwith a strategy highligh ting this distance he will move to analyse how cultureforms and breaks apart, when it is effective and when it is not, and whatrelationships structure the lives of individuals participating in the socialarrangement.

To be sure, in order to use this new perspective effectively, the culturalhistorian needs to tease out not only differences between cultures, but alsotheir similarities, and Nietzsche acknowledges, for these reasons, importantlikenesses between the developing conditions of the Greek world during thetime of the pre-Platonic philosophers and the developments of Westernsociety in the nineteenth century. Like the Europeans of modernity, theGreeks of the 'tragic age' were increasingly secular, wealthy and focusedpolitically on securing order in the city-states at home and on establishingcolonies abroad.12 Moreover, the changing social landscapes in the sixth andfifth centuries BCE were more and more related to a heightened interest in thenatural world, to humanistic notions of the individual s place in the hier-archy of existence, and to principles of rational and mathematicalcalculation.

Yet, for all of these similarities to modern Europe, Nietzsche s focus isprimarily directed at the crucial differences that separate the two worlds. Asindividuals, the Greeks were psychologically healthier than the moderns;they were emotionally stronger, in Nietzsche s view, more self-assured, less


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24 NIETZS HE ND THE GREEKS

alienated from their own natures and from nature as such. They enjoyedthese advantages because the common culture uniting the Greek world wasstronger and more clearly defined, and this strength helped the Greeks find

reliable answers to questions concerning the purpose of their being in theworld. They knew, instinctually, why they existed, and in their various phi-losophies and tragic festivals each of them affirmed to himself the meaning ofhis own particular existence, and by confirming the basic assumptions andworth of the culture s institutions, each of them affirmed the meaning ofexistence as such. For these reasons, Nietzsche argues that it is no coin-cidence the Greeks developed tragedy and philosophy at the same time andfo r the same purpose, given that both were born out of the instincts o f Greekculture and affirmed its value.

Like the tragedians whose works emerged into the Apollonian spectaclewith the wisdom of Dionysus, the Greek philosophers of the tragic agebrought their earthly wisdom into the public forum as sages walking as itwere out of the cave of Tropho nius .13 This movement between the Diony-sian, earthly and instinctual realm of chaotic oneness and the Apollonian,enlightened and rational realm of ordered individuation happens, accordingto Nietzsche, in the Greek w orld s thought as well as in its art.14

Nietzsche believed an analysis of the G reek philosopher wo uld prove to be

helpful for understanding contemporary

life. Is such a belief unfathomable?Outdated? In a late twentieth-century look at the problem of meaning andpurpose, Cornel West claims the context of Greek tragedy . .. is a societythat shares a collective experience of common metaphysical and socialmeanings. The context of modern tragedy, on the other hand - in whichindividuals struggle against meaninglessness - is a fragmented society withcollapsing metaphysical meanings.15 It was Nietzsche s classicism that firstuncovered the cultural difference touched upon here by West: unlike themoderns, whose cultural and intellectual developments are narrowed by

normative schools of thought - leading, paradoxically, to the fragm entationof society - the Greeks somehow enjoyed greater freedom because theirculture functioned to unify the Greeks in the pursuit of meaning, withoutmerely normalizing them in convention. While cultural unity in the Greekworld of the tragic age was responsible for the clarity of purpose in theindividual s public and private affairs, this unity did not prohibit the emer-gence of free-thinking artists and philosophers, geniuses who stood out fromthe masses and who considered even the most mundane occurrences withprofound depth and newly discovered levels of discernment. In point of fact,Nietzsche argues, the beliefs of the individual Greek philosophers were farfrom hom ogenous. Indeed, the very health of the Hellenic world is evident inthe culture s heterogeneity of types and in its acquiescence in a diversity ofbeliefs.16

Taken together, these claims challenge readers of Nietzsche s work on theGreeks because, placed side by side, they appear to raise a number ofquestions: who are these Greeks offering Nietzsche the untim ely perspectivefor critiquing modernity? Are they principally unified by a popular culture ?


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WHO ARE NIETZSCHE S GREEKS? 25

Or are they diverse and heterogeneous ? Are the Greek philosophersindependent thinkers? Free spirits? Exceptions to the normal ways ofthinking? Or are they bound to a homogeneous society, affirming its unity

and meaning in their concepts? Can the Greek philosophers exhibit all ofthese characteristics? If so, then by what means did the Greeks master suchcompeting states of being?

The philosopher and his culture

In the previous section, I suggested that Nietzsche s struggle with Winck-elmann and German classical scholarship was compelled by an important,philosophically grounded criticism of modernity. In this section, I will arguethat we can observe the philosophical foundation of this criticism in Nietz-sche s examination of Greek thought, which in his view mastered the dualnature of the G reek disposition and produced various types of philosophicalcharacters.

Nietzsche begins his lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers by claimingthat his interest is not to learn about philosophy from the Greeks, but ratherto learn about the Greeks from their philosophy. Hence, in Greek philoso-phy we will see, once again, the advancement of something incomprehen-sible from the dominant viewpoint of the Greeks .17 He w arns us again not tolook for the usual sober, harmonious, practical Greeks in their philosophy,and neither should we look for sensibilities leading to all sorts of indulgencesin artistic revelry . Their philosophy has not given itself over, exclusively, tothe calculative impulse, an attribute belonging more and m ore to the thoughtof the modern sciences; neither is it solely intuitive, like the ways of puremysticism. Philosophy in the tragic age, according to Nietzsche, masteredboth impulses. How did they achieve such mastery and what can we learn

about the Greeks from their philosophy?In the Introduction to his lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers,Nietzsche lays out four main themes for his study: 1) the Greek drive towardsphilosophy from out of themselves , 2) the appearance of the pre-Platonicphilosophers as exceptions among the Greeks unter den Griechen ausnahm),3) the relationship of the philosophers to the non-philosophers, to thepeople , and 4) the orig inality of the pre-Platonic philosopher s concep-tions.18 Pre-Platonic philosophy expressed the instincts of the Hellenic world:thus, we can learn something important about the Greek world, about itsinstincts, by examining its philosophers.

There is something superfluous about the philosophical systems emergingfrom such instincts. The pre-Platonic philosophers, like the Greek worlditself, were exceptions to the common rung of humanity stretched out overthe ages. Neither culture, nor society, nor individuals need philosophy as amatter of necessity. Compared to the Romans, who were not philosophical,it is no tew orthy , Nietzsche argues, that the Greeks philosophized at all;indeed, there must have existed such an excess of the intellect that their


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mental powers were no longer directed towards individual purposesin theway that ordinary thought seeks to advance self-interests. Rather, this excessspilled over, seeking to establish via pure intuition new and revived stan-

dards of excellence for all Greeks.19

The exception eschews the pursuit ofpractical interests for the sake of developing a speculative account of exis-tence, which serves as testimony to the creativity and general prosperity ofthe Greek instinct.

The Greek philosopher thus had a productive relationship with the non-philosopher. The measure of Greek culture as such, what makes it remark-able to the cultural historian and worthy of examination, according toNietzsche, is the degree to which Greek society not only tolerated these firstphilosophers and their disdain for practical pursuits, but actually recognizedand honoured them.20 In Nietzsche s view, this attribute reflects the fertilityof the Greek world, while modernity s unwillingness to honour this kind ofoverabundance, its intolerance, even, for the superfluous type, has mademodern life barren.

When did the relationship between philosophers and society change? W hatbrought this change? It begins, according to Nietzsche, when philosophy andthe philosopher become hostile not only to conventional forms of culturalunity but to cultural unity as such - in the philosophy of Plato, for example,which fragmented the Greek world by emphasizing, on the one hand, cal-culative proofs and in Plato s philosophical character which emphasized, onthe other hand , the authority of the philosopher s divinely inspired vision.This kind of philosophical system, which was also hostile to the philosophyof the pre-Platonics, produced only disassociated doubters, while the kind ofpersonality formulating this system inspired only sects of believers. Thus, inNietzsche s view, both the Platonic system of thought and Plato s charactertype were generally hostile to each other and to the culture from which theysprung.21 By comparison, the philosophy of the pre-Platonics differed in that

it was not a destabilizing force, but one that affirmed rather than dismissedthe Hellenic type.22

This is not to suggest, Nietzsche argues, that pre-Platonic philosophy wasmerely normative in character and in consequence. Indeed, the pre-Platonicphilosopher was an original thinker. His thought was certainly distinguishedfrom the quotidian beliefs of the non-philosophical Greek - the philosophymost characteristic of the tragic age was brought forth by men such asXenophanes, Heraclitus and Parmenides who were in no way sympathetic tothe conventional beliefs of the many nor to the people w ho

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WILKERSON - Nietzsche and the Greeks